I think he was referring to the mortgage and student loan “strikes” not being associated with SEIU. The protests of JPM/Chase would be pretty hard to disassociate with the unions since very few other groups do that sort of thing.
I don’t think so. I’ve been over the relevant portions of the tape and transcript and my impression is that associating any of this with the unions was to be avoided as being a PR disaster for the unions. That’s a broad-based principle that cannot reasonably be confined to only the later stages of the Lerner Action to which you refer.
The idea is that the localized bank protests stir up a high level of visibility, then the appropriate spokespersons will leverage all that free media access into a broader call for mortgage and other loan strikes. But Lerner generalizes about the covertness of union involvement, and doesn’t distinguish the early phase from the final phase, and strategically, from his perspective, that would be the only way to go. I’m still smelling something funny here.